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Webby Awards for Amsterdam-developed apps

Two apps developed in Amsterdam have won prizes at the prestigious Webby Awards in New York.

22 May 2015

The Webby Awards

The Webby Awards are generally regarded as the Oscars of the internet. Referred to as ‘the internet’s highest honour’ by The New York Times, the Webbys present awards in five categories: websites, advertising & media, online film & video, mobile sites & apps and social.

Human.co

Human Cities, an app that tracks human activity such as walking, cycling and motorised transport in major cities to gain insight in how we move in them, took home the People’s Voice Award in the ‘websites’ category.

Amikasa

The second Amsterdam-made app to win an award is Amikasa, which won the Webby Award in ‘mobile sites & apps’. Amikasa is an app developed especially for mobile devices; it allows users to build virtual rooms and move around in them. Users can reconstruct their own home and place new furniture, floors or art in it to get an impression of what this would look like in real life.

Appsterdam

The two awards are a boon for Amsterdam’s app developer and start-up community. Amsterdam has been praised numerous times as a heaven for app developers and a hotspot for start-ups in the tech sector. In a recent article, the British Financial Times described Amsterdam as a ‘modern-day refuge for the start-up crowd,’ praising the can-do mentality of the Dutch and the possibility for non-Dutch speakers to comfortably work and live in Amsterdam.

Best digital foundation

Especially relevant for start-ups in the ICT and tech sectors, the Netherlands is home to the sixth fastest internet in the world and the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area also boasts the best possible digital foundation thanks to the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), which is one of the largest data centres in the world. Many tech icons such as Uber, Twitter and Google have established offices in Amsterdam. The city is also regarded as particularly strong in gaming, fintech and 3D printing start-ups.